Traditional business processes rely on forms (paper documents), which are typically filled out by an individual and reviewed by one or more persons to control and document the flow of work within the business. Because of the cumbersome, costly, and error-prone nature of paper forms, businesses seek to automate the processes controlled by forms by making the forms into interactive electronic applications, which will decrease the time needed to complete the process and assure accurate and complete compliance with the business and legal requirements associated with the process.
In most systems that automate form based business processes the approach for describing business rules, namely the serial routing based on input field data, is data centric and is role based. The data centric approach is one where each data field on the form that may effect routing rules has a decision diagram built for it. How each data field effects the routing must be defined by the user either by using a graphical user interface to create a state diagram, or by writing custom programming code. As this routing rule is built the specific user or user role is considered. That is, if the submitter is Mary Johnson, then the next user is Joe Anderson. In the role based approach, if the submitter is in Marketing Group 1, then the next user is Market Group 1 Manager.
What is needed is a system to create electronic forms that can emulate the flow in a traditional paper form based process where each user is guided by a list of anonymous titles, or roles, listed on the form with lines or boxes where an indication of each user's approval in the electronic process will be stored, just as the hand written signature signifies approval on the paper counterpart.